


The Caged Bird

by JMilz



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dark, Angst, Character Death, Christmas, Christmas Angst, Dark Hermione Granger, F/M, Implied/Referenced Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-24
Updated: 2020-12-24
Packaged: 2021-03-10 20:34:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,442
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28283271
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JMilz/pseuds/JMilz
Summary: In a world run by Voldemort, war-torn Draco Malfoy laments the loss of his beloved. Unfortunately, Christmas is all the worse in Azkaban.
Relationships: Hermione Granger/Draco Malfoy
Comments: 17
Kudos: 25
Collections: Harry Potter Fanfiction Club Presents: Christmas 2020





	The Caged Bird

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to Lunatik_Pandora for betaing this work. <3

Ice.

It frosted the iron bars and varnished the stones lining his cell. 

For months, winter had been creeping up upon him, threatening nights of crimson fingertips and chattering teeth. Inescapable nights. Haunting nights.

Had it really been three years?

On a December afternoon much like this one, he had been stripped of his wand and thrust into the claustrophobic room, forced to live in his own filth like the animal they thought he was. Perhaps he was an animal. Perhaps no sane man would do what he did.

Yet, he regretted nothing.

_“Is she really worth it, Draco?” Theo had asked. “You understand what could happen, don’t you? You could be killed for this.”_

_“Then at least I’d die doing the right thing for once.”_

And he would have. For her, he would have done _anything_.

Lie, cheat, kill. He was willing to do it all — and he had.

_“You wish to have the Mudblood?” the Dark Lord had asked, craning his neck. “Surely, this filth will not distract you from your duties?”_

_“No, my Lord. She is merely a guilty pleasure.”_

If she had been quiet, they might have lived like that until the end of their days. They might have grown old together, dancing upon the fragile wire that the Dark Lord had granted them. Alas, she would never allow such a thing. It wasn’t who she was, and if she were anything but herself, he wouldn’t have loved her.

_“You can’t! I won’t let you!”_

_“I wasn’t asking for your permission.”_

_She was shoving clothes in that endless bag of hers, her umber eyes wild and her movements sporadic. There was no talking to her when she was like that. But he had to try. He had to convince her she couldn’t leave — not with the world the way that it was. He couldn’t live without her. He didn’t_ want _to live without her._

 _“Granger, you understand what will happen if you leave here. You understand that they could — they could_ kill _you.”_

_She stopped, only momentarily. A pair of Muggle trousers were in her firm grip as she met his pleading gaze, almost as though she had come to her senses . He wanted nothing more. Even if she were a bird in a cage, a caged bird was a safe bird._

_But she had never been one for safety._

_She was brash and selfless and courageous. She had wings that spanned far beyond his own, wings meant to fly, meant to know freedom. She was all the things he was not. And he had caged her._

_To fill that empty place in his heart only she could fill, he had sequestered her away in the confines of his bedchamber, to be displayed as an object in front of his friends, his family — even in the eyes of the Ministry._

_The piece of him that had been missing since he was a boy: it was her._

_It was always her._

_But he was killing her. He was seeing it for the very first time: the way the light went from her eyes whenever he announced another mission, the way her voice broke when she found loose newspapers, the way she looked at him and asked only one thing of him._

_To love her._

_And though he knew very little of love, love was not a cage. That, he was certain of._

_“I’ve sat idly by for a long time . . . I’ve stayed here for you and — and if you know me at all you know I can’t do it anymore. You_ know _I have to go.”_

_The dam holding back his hot tears broke after that. She collected him in her arms, whispering the mantra that had so become their own._

_Whether it was by design or on accident, he wasn’t sure._

_“I love you, I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”_

Six Death Eaters died in her wake, but the seventh, Bellatrix Lestrange, was too powerful. Draco returned to Malfoy Manor after one of his more heinous missions, only to find her body upon the ballroom floor.

Bellatrix was dead by morning.

He had unleashed every ounce of his malice upon her, robbing her of the painlessness of the Killing Curse. Whatever Granger had endured — he hoped what he did to Bellatrix was a hundredfold worse. 

Judging by her mangled corpse, it was.

And so the courts found him guilty of murdering the last, best lieutenant and they condemned him to a lifetime of isolation.

But none of that mattered.

It was the memories that tortured him most.

For three years, he had been lamenting his long-lost love and all he had done to wrong her. The prejudice. The lies. The Vanishing Cabinet. Her blood was on his hands as much as Bellatrix’s, and for that, he deserved to suffer.

He was sickness. He was war. He was death.

With a heavy sigh he lay back on his bed, his steel eyes fixed upon the ceiling to count the stones yet again.

They told him he would die there, but it didn’t matter. 

He had died long ago.

* * *

How many hours passed him by, he couldn’t be sure. All he knew was that the sky was stormy and black and his breath but a cloud in the frigid air. The night seemed like any other in December — an evening of shivering and dappled skin.

That was when he heard them.

The words that made his blood run cold.

“Hello, Draco.”

His eyes darted to the barred window from which the voice came, for he nearly thought he imagined it.

After all, it _was_ impossible. 

“Granger.”

“You seem surprised to see me,” she laughed, gliding towards him in a way too aristocratic to be herself, and too haunting to be human. “Always so surprised.”

 _Always._ What a strange word to use for such a rare occasion.

“I didn’t know it was that time of year yet.”

“Really?” she asked, weightlessly dropping onto the bed beside him. “I assumed your mother would’ve come by. She was always fond of the holidays, no?”

“I’m not allowed visitors anymore.”

“ _Hmph_. That seems inhumane even by Azkaban’s standards.”

Draco shrugged. He missed her infinitely, yet he never knew what to say to her.

Perhaps it was because it wasn’t her at all.

“I could stay, you know,” she purred. “If you ask it of me, I’d never have to leave again. We could be happy, Draco. I could be your little pet — the one you always said I was? You know, when your friends were around . . . That is, of course, assuming you haven’t found a new Mudblood to sully with your seed.”

“You’re not real,” he spat. “You’re not her.”

“But I could be. That could be my Christmas present to you — to never leave, and to be what you always wanted me to be: a shiny — little — toy.” 

Her hand caressed his face just then, but her fingertips were as icy as the snow falling upon the North Sea — and aside from that, the honey-umber he knew so well was long gone, replaced by pits of blackest black.

Pits of wickedness. Pits of treachery.

Hermione Granger could never be such things. Hermione Granger was everything Draco could never be and so much more. This woman — this _thing_ — it was something else. Something foul.

“Why do you do this?” he growled. “Every bloody year, you come here and you — you —”

“It’s okay, Draco,” she cooed. “You don’t have to fight me. You don’t have to fight _us_.”

_“There is no us.”_

The corner of her mouth quirked upward in a smirk, and suddenly, she reached down to the floor. Raking her fingernails through the loose rocks and caking dirt, she hummed a small tune — one he didn’t recognize.

“What are you doing? Stop that!”

The humming ceased at once. Chuckling softly, she sat up and pulled his hands into hers, almost as though she had never hummed in the first place — almost as though he had simply imagined it.

She was staring at him with those onyx pits of endless black.

This was magic darker than any he had ever known. That, he was sure of.

“Every caged bird must fly free, Draco. Someday, you’ll join me. Someday, we’ll be together again.” She pressed her glacial lips to his forehead, drawing an involuntary shudder. “Happy Christmas, Draco.”

And with that, she disappeared as suddenly as she came. As soon as she was gone, he looked down in his hands — the hands she had held hostage for only a brief moment.

In them, was a single rock.

A sharp rock.

The key to his cage.


End file.
